Over the next few months, you’re going to see Superman/Batman actually reflecting major events of the past of the DC Universe. We’re going to be building on other stories, other events, using these characters. So you’re going to see an expansion on Superman/Batman’s role in the post-“Emperor Joker’s” world. So you’re going to see effects of “Emperor Joker” in Superman/Batman. As well as “Our Worlds at War”. There are going to be events that we’re going to be filling out there.

Now, let me just say I haven’t been reading Superman/Batman and don’t intend to start right now. I don’t mean that as a judgment, but rather just to say that I have no vested interest in the title, and so this decision impacts my life in no way whatsoever; I am an entirely outside observer.

That said: It’s damned weird, isn’t it?

I don’t keep up with current sales figures and don’t really know where to look for a complete list, but I am guessing Superman/Batman isn’t selling as much as DC would like it to, right? Hence the shakeup. That makes sense. And DiDio does say the stories will also be tying in with events in the current DC Universe. That also makes sense. You can ignore a Superman/Batman book that’s going on in its own little bubble, but if it’s got a “Blackest Night” banner on it, you’ve got to buy it, right? (Note: You do not actually have to buy it.)

But expanding on past stories? Books like those aren’t known for tearing up the sales charts, are they? Legends of the Dark Knight had 200-plus issues, Legends of the DC Universe did okay for a while, and they’re still putting out Batman Confidential. But Superman Confidential only lasted 14 issues. JLA and JSA Classified are gone and not terribly missed. Untold Tales of Spider-Man was well-regarded (and don’t think I didn’t love it), but cancelled after 25 issues; Webspinners: Tales of Spider-Man only made it to 18.

Also, look at the specific examples DiDio uses. “Emperor Joker” and “Our Worlds At War,” circa 2000-01. All right, here is where I admit something to you: I bought both of those crossovers when they first came out. (I was in high school and had a part-time job, so I had money but little responsibility; I have never bought more monthly superhero comics on a regular basis before or since, and I probably never will again.) “OWAW” reads like a hamhanded commentary on 9/11 and the national mood in its aftermath, although strangely it came out just a few months before. “Emperor Joker,” on the other hand, a story where the Joker gets access to Mr. Mxyzptlk’s powers and remakes the world in his own image, I remember as being thoroughly decent; not great, not awful, but entertaining enough for what it was.

And yet, I have no interest in this whatsoever. I thought “Emperor Joker” was already too long at nine issues spread over two months. And an “expansion of Superman/Batman’s role” in the storyline? The story was all about Superman and Batman in the first place. It’d be one thing to ask, “What was going on with these characters during a crossover in which they were only marginal figures?” This is like saying you’re going to retell Spider-Man’s origin from Spider-Man’s perspective.

Mr. DiDio: I do not often agree with your editorial decisions, but I am not the sort to wave my arms about and call you an idiot. I realize that being EiC of a superhero comic book company is a demanding but somewhat thankless job. Nevertheless, I have to say I fear you have made a grave miscalculation here. Because I am the target audience for this book; older fans probably care more about stuff like “Invasion!” or “Legends,” and younger fans have never heard of “Our Worlds At War.” This should be right in my nostalgia wheelhouse, and yet “Emperor Joker” is maybe a notch below Deep Blue Something in the grand hierarchy of Things I Cared About In High School.

So I have to ask, who is supposed to be buying this comic, if not me? And why is DC pushing “untold tales” when “untold tales” are rarely sales successes?

It may not surprise you to hear that I have a theory, but it can wait until next week. But let me know in the meantime — does this strike anyone else as a baffling strategy, or is it just my problem?

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…but if it’s got a “Blackest Night” banner on it, you’ve got to buy it, right? (Note: You do not actually have to buy it.)

Thanks for clarifying.

I have to say I was a little taken aback by “Emperor Joker” being the focal crossover/event. I had a similar thought a few years back that involved showing the “lagged effects” of bigger crossovers in the DCU, but the aftermaths of events like Crisis, Zero Hour, and Infinite Disappointment as well as the prospect of similar continuity-altering future events make it too hard to pull off. IMHO, at least.

At a guess, it’s because the Superman/Batman title is sticking with Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne, which doesn’t fit with the current state of affairs, but Didio has a serious *thing* about continuity, so he’s wedging stories in wherever he thinks they’ll fit. Instead of the much saner option of having a title featuring DC’s flagship characters in a title that isn’t impacted by whatever nonsense is going on everywhere else.

Superman/Batman was a Big Fucking Deal when it started I guess, getting over (sometimes very much well over) 100K in sales when it first came out; dropped lately to 40K average. It’s sad that any title selling over 150,000 issues is a top seller these days, but such is the industry.

So I can see why they might want to shake it up and they don’t have a lot of secondary cast left to murder these days, so I guess reaching into the barrel of continuity it is.

What I don’t get with the Emporer Joker story is that we SAW Supes and Bats teaming up in the second half of it. Heck, that was the focal point of the second half.

In fact, we saw them join up several times AFTER that with Clark worried about telling Bruce that he took his memories away of what the Joker did to him (and Bruce “punched” him with bat-missles in an awesome moment).

So what is there to expand on it? Plus, we’ve had a maxi-series similar to this concept, already, called World’s Finest. It had self-contained issues where they got together after the Death in the Family (which the super-imposed Superman’s killing of the Kryptonian criminals at the same time) and even Reign of the Supermen and KnightQuest. This has been done before. And better.

So yeah, I won’t be buying it. I bought the first storyarc out of curiosity and it was so terrible that I have no interest in the title, anymore.

And, unlike all the other “Tales of…” series, this will be tied to very specific events rather than just being untold stories that happened N years ago. Weird.

I hope they try to mimic the art style of the era, though.

Now, if only they will revisit the unfortunate Superman and Big Barda porno movie issue from John Byrne’s run — surely that is as significant as Emperor Joker in defining the characters, and perhaps Matches Malone was a camera man.

I’m not a fan of continuity in comics. Marvel and DC rarely change anything about any of their flagship characters. Even Spider-Man was rewound back to 35 years ago. If Spider-Man is always going to be Spider-Man and Superman is always going to be Superman, why don’t they just do an infinite number of one-shots and leave them all as standalone stories?

Then if someone wants to write Peter Parker as a clone and have Ben Reilly come be the “real” Spider-Man for a while, that can be its own story, and when it’s done, someone else can write another Peter Parker Spider-Man story. You wanna write Spider-Man as not being married? Fine, do a story about that. Then let the next guy do a married Peter Parker story. If they were all standalone stories, you wouldn’t have to worry about how one of these stories tied into another, and you’d eliminate all the ridiculosity involved with making them all fit.

If there were any permanence AT ALL to changes made to characters in comics, I would be all about continuity. But there’s not, so you might as well ignore it entirely.

Lindsey: Thanks for the link, although seeing actual sales figures are stone-cold sobering. Actually, Superman/Batman seems to be doing pretty *okay* if not exceptional, which makes this an even weirder decision, I think.

Also: Dark Wolverine is outselling Weapon X and Origins?? Just to be clear, am I mistaken in understanding that books featuring Marvel’s most popular character (or second most if Spider-Man is the first) are selling less than a book about a guy *pretending* to be that character? MADNESS.

I found it curious that the two projects mentioned were both Jeph Loeb ones.

And I read the mandate as being less “how do these old stories involve Superman and Batman” and more “how exactly do these stories fit into the current state of continuity”. (Which in turn could mean that they turn on the proliferation of Generals Zod and Supergirls…)

OWAW and Emperor Joker were great, fun actioney storytelling that DC hasn’t done ever since it decided it would rather choke to death on its own self-importance. I don’t know why in the hell you’d want to wind them into present continuity either as a fan of the former or the present-day status quo.

Yeah, I guess the book could shift focus to DickBat and Mon-El, right? That might’ve been something: Dick has a pretty high opinion of, if not outright idolizes, Superman; and figure he would probably be Batmanian in his dickery to Mon-El. Mon-El would be frustrated because he feels he can’t measure up to Superman, yet wonder why he cares what a kid in his dead dad’s clothes thinks. (Answer: Because he’s Batman.)

That makes more sense than going back to the greatest hits, unless they’re doing it to flog sales of the trades; and I don’t know how that would work either.

“So I can see why they might want to shake it up and they don’t have a lot of secondary cast left to murder these days, so I guess reaching into the barrel of continuity it is.”

The lunatics running the asylum should have realized a long time ago that it’s easier to have long-term plans for your comic book line when you aren’t slaughtering B-list characters wholesale just because Grant Morrison came up with a slightly better costume design for somebody, or because Dan DiDio didn’t like some character nobody was using very often anyway.

But that crap isn’t going to stop as long as DiDio and Geoff Johns hang on to the crazy belief that “dramatic” deaths are like printing money.

If DC wants to still have fans in twenty years, they’re probably going to have to celebrate the anniversary of Zero Hour by saying that practically everything since the first issue of 52 doesn’t count because it happened in some crazy Heroes Reborn-type fake universe that Superboy Prime and Alexander Luthor accidentally created during Infinite Crisis.

When they finally break down and do “Hour Zero” or whatever they call it, I might start buying DC comics again.

What I want to know is, now that DiDio’s gone for “we’re going to have this series explore past continuity,” how long is it going to be before he swings back around to “continuity sucks and is a restrictive straitjacket on glorious creativity, so we’re just going to ignore it.” I’m starting the clock now.

That’s not going to be able to happen as long as Geoff Johns keeps getting away with things like an overly complicated (and completely unnecessary)explanation for why Barry Allen wore bow ties.

DC is totally schizo right now. They keep bouncing back and forth from “old continuity only counts if Johns or Morrison liked the story” to “Everything counts. Even if we said it didn’t.” Basically, whichever one will get people to buy more Green Lantern comics that month.

DiDio can’t take that position with a straight face until he starts doing something about Johns and his Roy Thomas wannabe tendencies.

Good God, I hope not. Why Loeb has continued to get work for the last… uh, at least 7 years (possibly longer, but that’s how long ago “Hush” was, and he was already well into his crap phase then), I have no idea.

If it *is* all about bringing those stories in-line with the new Superman continuity and all that … holy crap, I can’t imagine anything less worthwhile. Because those wouldn’t even be *stories*, those would just be continuity patches, and really, DiDio could save us all the trouble and just clarify, “The Matrix Supergirl (is/isn’t) in continuity anymore,” or whatever in one of his Newsarama interviews and be done with it. That doesn’t actually require *narrative* to get the point across. They used to take care of that sort of stuff in letters pages; that’s what they were *for*, to some extent.

And frankly, unlike a lot of problems in this world, the existence of multiple and contradictory General Zods really *does* go away when you stop thinking about it.

On the matter of Jeph Loeb: I liked his older stuff at the time, but he’s one of those artists (I mean the word in the general sense) whose recent work makes me re-examine his past work in a harsher light. Like, I re-read an old comic that I used to like, but I can’t see anything but harbingers of the stuff that would drive me crazy later.

Craig Oxbrow: I’m just saying, it could be bunnies. I HAVE SEVERAL GOOD REASONS FOR THINKING SO.

I suspect it’s that DC have noticed that Marvel keeps releasing “House of M” tie-in titles and those are doing reasonably well. (Assuming they are, of course.) So in a move reminiscent of Hollywood movie executives, they’ve said, “Hey, what can we do that’s like this other thing that’s a marginal success?”

40K is not where you want a title billed as flagship to be. It’s only marginally above Wonder Woman, who is made part of the “Big Three” only because DC really wants to shake that image of being all old white males, an image that bringing back and fellating Hal Jordan and Barry Allen doesn’t help any.

40K is where they start looking for new creative teams for X-Men, for instance, a title that routinely sells in the top 20, if not top 10, despite Marvel treating it like their unwanted stepchild. I admit X-Men as a franchise has issues a mile high, but their popularity didn’t arise from nothing. When Claremont’s ‘ignore continuity let me do my own thing’ X-men outsells the regular title, it is definitely time for examination.

I mention these things because these sales figures matter a lot in decisions that are made about major characters and their direction. It makes me very, very happy that Batwoman has managed to almost double the sales of Detective from before the Neil Gaiman two-parter, for various personal reasons.

It also makes doing something to change Superman/Batman seem almost rational, in a world where all stories must somehow revolve around these two characters.

I totally agree that 40K is not where you want a flagship to be, but then that’s a symptom of sales being low across the board. I mean, in July’s figures, sales drop below 100K at #7, and the top six are boosted by events and milestones (GL/Blackest Night, Amazing #600, etc.) as it is.

And if we’re calling Superman/Batman a flagship book, then the question is how many flagship books can you claim to have, especially when they involve the same characters? S/B seems like it *should* be in the top 20, but then so should Superman and Action, and Batman and Detective, and Justice League, and they all *theoretically* feature Batman and Superman, so which one should be the “main” book to the detriment of the others?

For this reason, I’d much rather that flagship books were not planned as such, and just happened organically instead. Like you mentioned Batwoman in Detective, which isn’t a top book based on editorial and marketing saying “This *should* be in the top 25,” but on the strength of its creative team. Also, although I don’t like Geoff Johns, I can’t deny the man has fans, and that the market has subsequently demanded Green Lantern be a top book even though GL isn’t in DC’s Big Three or anything (and before anyone says anything about “letting the market decide,” let me just say that comic books and health care are VERY DIFFERENT…)

In any event, using Superman/Batman to play catch-up with 10-year-old events doesn’t seem like a way to boost the book’s profile to me. I almost wonder if this isn’t a placeholder to keep the title giong during this “world without a Batman/Superman phase” and that DC might be planning something big for the book when Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne return.

Well, they seem determined to make the DCU seem ever more lopsided. You’ve got the big two, and then everybody else.

Compare with Marvel, where in a given crossover a pivotal save-the-world role could go to Thor, Mr. Fantastic, Iron Man, Spider-Man, or half a dozen other guys (with a mirror in the X-half of their universe)– and odds are that they’re all going to play some kind of interesting part. In Final Crisis, predictably, Batman beats the bad guy and Superman Saves Us All.

So now, let’s put even more emphasis on them and how much more special they are than the rest of the poor schlubs running around the DCU in tights!